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Development in Agricultural Education, Research, Extension and Technological Progress
 Agricultural education, research and extension have made remarkable progress. China has 58 agricultural universities and colleges with a total of 0.8 million graduates; 365 agricultural secondary schools with a total of 1.3 million graduates; 2,600-plus agricultural TV and broadcasting schools at country level with 0.1 million graduates every year. Annually, more than 30 million farmers attend technical training courses, including that for "green certificate". The number of agricultural research units has increased to 1,200 with 0.2 million research workers. China has 230,000 extension units at township level and above, forming a nationwide agro-tech extension network composed of state, collective and non-governmental service organizations. Agricultural research has made a number of important break-throughs and practical technology has been widely popularized and used in farm production.
 Since the reform and opening-up, agricultural science and technology in China has made conspicuous achievements. The share contributed by science and technology to agriculture growth has increased from about 20% up to 45%. Chinese agricultural scientists have made great efforts in their work and have developed a number of new varieties or breeds of crops, livestock, poultry and fish. The improved varieties used in crop farming has accounted for 85% of the total. All of this has laid the very foundation for improving the comprehensive capacity of agricultural production and increasing the output and the farmers' income as well. Especially, the successful breeding of hybrid rice has made great contribution to the increased yield per unit, which has been raised from 6,000 kg per ha up to over 8,000 per ha.
Meanwhile, China has introduced a lot of new varieties or breeds of crops, livestock, poultry and fish from other countries. By doing so the germplasm resources for research on breeding has been enriched. During the period from 1996 to 2001, China introduced over 10,000 improved varieties, in-bred strains and cross-bred parents and germplasm materials of grain, cotton, oil crops, fruits and vegetables; nearly 3,000 heads of herd boar, stock ram and herd bull; and nearly 5,000 embryos of breeding stocks. Thanks to improvement of crop farming systems, various types of intercropping and relay intercropping systems for grain-oil, grain-cotton and grain-vegetable production have been developed. The "vertical farming" system with multiple plants and multiple layers that can fully utilize the space has been created. As regard to crop culture, several advanced and practical technologies have been applied through extension such as the plastic film nursing and mulching as well as greenhouse culture. Production of more than 40 crops including grain, cotton, oil-bearing crops, fruits, vegetables, sugar and tobacco has extensively used film mulching culture, leading to 15 to 20 percent of increased output. All these show that agricultural science and technology has become the engine for the development of agriculture.
Edited by CECAT
2003/01/2 |
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